IPTV App Development: Technologies, Challenges and Opportunities

Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), live streaming TV included, is a modern technology spinning up rapidly in our days. It’s a system through which television services are passed with IPS instead of conventional on-earth satellite signal, as well as cable television formats. IPTV tech is part of entirely new kind of services that are meant to alleviate video entertainment accessibility.

With more web technology coming to television, web applications and native applications get a smaller gap between them. Firefox OS, for example, already supports TV Manager API, basics of W3C TV Control API that enables web-based apps to get information like EPG from service providers, additionally managing native TV hardware. Firefox OS uses various API specs to completely support TV functions on a web platform, with some of them turning into standards. Among these are streaming, recording,track management, tuner, channel and others.

Content agencies address professional software developers to make their websites more presentable with IPTV embedded apps since visual data has become an integral part of a quality web solution. Software development vendors are often in high demand for multiple IPTV development projects whose main goals are to improve user experiences and to reach bigger revenues for the content providers. Yet, with all this high demand there’s a number of challenges among all IPTV operators:

Right start

As it’s a new complex technology, issues at an early stage are no surprise. And even though lots of them get quickly solved, strong competition with experienced satellite and cable providers requires top quality service. This may cause the growth of customer care costs when client-retention becomes a must.

Secure, relevant and adequate content

Proper content is one of the biggest problems for IPTV vendors within the space of their work. The number of actual and prospective clients in this niche is far smaller than the ones in cable and satellite TV market. Thus, close cooperation between IPTV providers may improve the situation with key content agencies who are able to enlarge the range of available content for everyone. However, this strategy is very risky and investments won’t bring much of guarantee.

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Advertising funded capabilities and new models development

In order to become and remain profitable, IPTV vendors need to take advantage of Pay TV and Pay Per View (PPV) services. One of the opportunities here is to build ad funded models based on the Internet users. Nonetheless, apart from technical issues, there is still a significant lack of required liaisons and scale for generating critical income.

Commercial to functional convergence

Voice and data bundling IPTV offers have proven to be quite effective in services promotion. But this approach may also sabotage profitability because discounts are the ones making bundles attractive. It makes a lot of sense to stand out by:

Delivering on technical side of IPTV through integrated Mobile TV offers

Enabling PVRs to be programmed at distance

Delivering IPTV content to PCs

Allowing for IM and chat services from and to TV

Building interactive services based on UGC (video dating on IPTV platform)

Functional convergence will optimize and distinguish client experience which is going to facilitate long-term cost policies.

Personalization delivery

IPTV will eventually have to leverage the user profiling capabilities of digital media platforms and provide targeted advertisement, increase income capabilities and become a differentiator among the rest of Pay TV platforms.

What else can IPTV application development bring to the table?

Easy-to-use content management and distribution systems should be created

Video content should be protected from stream hi-jacking and copyrights violation

Web 2.0 interactivity should get properly presented as a service promoting tool

Easy-to-manage payment tools and subscription should be provided

TV broadcast techniques and apps are quickly evolving. More functions and further enhancements might get added very soon due to standardization processes and that will make TV experience a little web- and mobile-friendlier.

Intersog is currently working on IPTV app development project and will share our experience and best practices once the project has been accepted by the Client. Follow us in Twitter and LinkedIn to stay tuned!

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I’m a freelance Copywriter whose career started nearly 15 years ago as an English teacher turning into a Sales associate/Account manager and ending up writing from home for over 4 years now. I believe it is vital for a versatile professional to constantly develop various skills, thus I’m always open and excited for new projects.